Peter Kyle

Peter Kyle (born 1970), Labour MP for Hove since 2015, became Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology in July 2024 and made himself the operational face of Keir Starmer’s pivot from AI safety to AI growth. It was Kyle who commissioned investor Matt Clifford in July 2024 to write what became the AI Opportunities Action Plan, launched in January 2025 with all 50 recommendations accepted — AI Growth Zones, a twentyfold public compute expansion, and AI pushed into the NHS and civil service.

Eating his own cooking

In March 2025, a freedom-of-information request by New Scientist revealed that Kyle used ChatGPT in his ministerial work — asking it, among other things, why British businesses were slow to adopt AI and which podcasts he should appear on. Critics jeered; Downing Street defended him, and Kyle leaned in, casting personal AI use as exactly the adoption habit he wanted the whole country to develop. He also championed the government’s contested proposal to let AI firms train on copyrighted work unless creators opt out, drawing fire from musicians and authors, and courted hyperscaler data-center investment across the UK.

At London Tech Week in June 2025 he framed Britain’s ambition as making AI models at home and using them “to shape a better future for every citizen.” In the September 2025 reshuffle Kyle moved on from the science brief, but by then he had fixed the government’s direction: growth first, adoption everywhere, and regulation kept deliberately light.